Category: History

… of George and Martha Washington, married on this date in 1759.

… of George and Barbara Bush, married on this date in 1945.

George and Martha had no children (she had two surviving children from her previous marriage).

Alas, George and Barbara did have children.

As The New York Times reported on this date in 1914:

Henry Ford, head of the Ford Motor Company, announced…one of the most remarkable business moves of his entire remarkable career. In brief it is:

To give to the employees of the company $10,000,000 of the profits of the 1914 business, the payments to be made semi-monthly and added to the pay checks.

To run the factory continuously instead of only eighteen hours a day, giving employment to several thousand more men by employing three shifts of eight hours each, instead of only two nine-hour shifts, as at present.

To establish a minimum wage scale of $5 per day. Even the boy who sweeps up the floors will get that much.

Before any man in any department of the company who does not seem to be doing good work shall be discharged, an opportunity will be given to him to try to make good in every other department. No man shall be discharged except for proved unfaithfulness or irremediable inefficiency.

Read the complete Times article.

President Harry S. Truman, 59 years ago today in his State of the Union Address:

We must spare no effort to raise the general level of health in this country. In a nation as rich as ours, it is a shocking fact that tens of millions lack adequate medical care. We are short of doctors, hospitals, nurses. We must remedy these shortages. Moreover, we need–and we must have without further delay–a system of prepaid medical insurance which will enable every American to afford good medical care.

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on this date in 1863.

Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it did fundamentally transform the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of Federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

From the first days of the Civil War, slaves had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery’s final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.

Source: The National Archives

Click document image for larger version.

Savannah, Ga., Dec. 22. [1864]

To His Excellency, President Lincoln:

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.

(Signed.) W. T. Sherman, Major-General

The headline in The New York Times the following day read: Savannah Ours.

The French colors were lowered and the American flag raised in New Orleans on this date in 1803, signifying the transfer of sovereignty of Louisiana from France to the United States. Arguably the transfer was one of the two or three most defining moments in American history.

As ultimately defined, Louisiana Territory included most of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River, east of the Rocky Mountains, except for Texas and New Mexico; that is, parts or all of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.

… just 142 years ago that the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was officially adopted.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Just 142 years ago.

13th Amendment Site-Home

Orville and Wilbur Wright successfully made the first four sustained flights of a heavier-than-air machine under the complete control of the pilot at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, 104 years ago today. Their fourth attempt, at 10:35 am, lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet.

The photograph (click to enlarge) “shows Orville Wright at the controls of the machine, lying prone on the lower wing with hips in the cradle which operated the wing-warping mechanism. Wilbur Wright running alongside to balance the machine, has just released his hold on the forward upright of the right wing.” (Source: Library of Congress)

It was on this date in 1773 that the Boston Tea Party took place. Fortunately for the future of America, the populace at that time was not encumbered with excessive Christmas shopping or second-rate bowl games and could pay attention to public affairs.

In 1770, the British Parliament ended the Townshend Duties — taxes on the sales of lead, glass, paper, paints and tea — ended them on all but the tea. The tax on British tea and a boycott of it in many of the colonies continued.

Tea was a hot commodity in the colonies, however, and considerable foreign tea was smuggled into America to avoid the tax. Some four-fifths of the tea consumed in America was brought in by smugglers.

In 1773 Parliament, in an effort to both prevent the bankruptcy of the East India Company and raise tax revenue, reduced the tea tax and gave the company a monopoly in the American tea business. The price of tea would be lower than smugglers could match, Americans would buy East India tea, the company would revive, and the tax, though lower, would be paid on vastly more tea. Win-win.

Continue reading Tea time

The first radio transmission across the Atlantic was made by Guglielmo Marconi on this date in 1901 (Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada). The message consisted of Morse code for the letter “s”.

That would be dot-dot-dot.

Which is better than a lot of stuff on the airwaves 106 years later.

An 800-year-old map, the sole surviving copy of a chart used by the Roman Empire’s courier service, was put on show for just one day on Monday after being accorded “Memory of the World” status by UNESCO.

The parchment scroll, nearly 7 metres (yards) long, could only be displayed briefly because too much light would damage it, before it was returned to storage at Austria’s National Library, where it has been since 1738.

Named Tabula Peutingeriana after the German antiquarian who owned it in the 16th century, the map shows roads linking some 4,000 settlements as well as mountains, rivers and forests from Spain in the west to China in the east.

From north to south, the map covers the British Isles to north Africa. But because the scroll is just over 30 cms (12 inches) high, the north-south axis is greatly compressed, depicting the Mediterranean Sea as a small stretch of blue squeezed between today’s Croatia and Italy.

Yahoo! News

A Springfield rifle owned by the famed Apache warrior Geronimo fetched $100,000 during an auction of Wild West guns and weapons that brought in more than $1 million.

Lawman Wyatt Earp’s double-barreled shotgun garnered $65,500, while a saber attributed to U.S. Army cavalry commander George Custer sold for $20,315 at the Bonhams & Butterfields auction Tuesday.

Yahoo! News

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Newly found image of Lincoln at Gettysburg on this date in 1863. Long-distance crowd shot, but kind of interesting anyway.

The Library of Congress has an online exhibit relating to The Gettysburg Address — drafts, the invitation, photo.

From The History Channel:

At exactly noon on this day [in 1883], American and Canadian railroads begin using four continental time zones to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of local times. The bold move was emblematic of the power shared by the railroad companies.

The need for continental time zones stemmed directly from the problems of moving passengers and freight over the thousands of miles of rail line that covered North America by the 1880s. Since human beings had first begun keeping track of time, they set their clocks to the local movement of the sun. Even as late as the 1880s, most towns in the U.S. had their own local time, generally based on “high noon,” or the time when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. As railroads began to shrink the travel time between cities from days or months to mere hours, however, these local times became a scheduling nightmare. Railroad timetables in major cities listed dozens of different arrival and departure times for the same train, each linked to a different local time zone.

Efficient rail transportation demanded a more uniform time-keeping system. Rather than turning to the federal governments of the United States and Canada to create a North American system of time zones, the powerful railroad companies took it upon themselves to create a new time code system. The companies agreed to divide the continent into four time zones; the dividing lines adopted were very close to the ones we still use today.

Most Americans and Canadians quickly embraced their new time zones, since railroads were often their lifeblood and main link with the rest of the world. However, it was not until 1918 that Congress officially adopted the railroad time zones and put them under the supervision of the Interstate Commerce Commission.

…became a state 100 years ago today. It was the 46th state to enter the Union.

The official song and anthem of the State of Oklahoma is “Oklahoma,” composed and written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.

Brand new state, Brand new state, gonna treat you great!
Gonna give you barley, carrots and pertaters,
Pasture fer the cattle, Spinach and Termayters!
Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom,
Plen’y of air and plen’y of room,
Plen’y of room to swing a rope!
Plen’y of heart and plen’y of hope!
Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain,
And the wavin’ wheat can sure smell sweet
When the wind comes right behind the rain.
Oklahoma, ev’ry night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk makin’ lazy circles in the sky.
We know we belong to the land
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say – Yeeow! Ayipioeeay!
We’re only sayin’ You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma! Oklahoma – O.K.